"Big Fund" leads a 2.5 billion financing group to inject into Galaxy General. Embodied intelligence enters a critical period of scaling up?

Spring 2026 arrives earlier than in previous years for China’s embodied intelligence sector.

On March 2, Galaxy General Robotics announced that the company recently completed a new round of financing totaling 2.5 billion yuan. Investors include the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Fund (the third phase of the National Big Fund), Sinopec, CITIC Investment Holdings, Bank of China, SAIC Group Financial Holdings, SMIC Juyuan, Yizhuang State Investment, Future Industry Investment, Kunpeng Fund, Wuxi Venture Capital, Fujian Industry Investment, among others, with multiple longstanding shareholders continuing to add investments.

This is only two months after their previous disclosed financing of over $300 million (about 2.1 billion yuan). The involvement of the National Big Fund Phase III through the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Fund, along with major state-owned enterprises like Sinopec and Bank of China, marks the official deep positioning of the embodied intelligence track by the “national team.”

Since its establishment in May 2023, Galaxy General has accumulated funding that ranks first in China’s embodied intelligence field within less than three years, with valuation leading the industry.

Founded by 34-year-old Peking University professor Wang He and industry expert Yao Tengzhou, this company has achieved continuous large-scale financing even amid the lingering cold winter of capital, raising questions about the technological core behind the robot that performed alongside Shen Teng and Ma Li on the recent Spring Festival Gala, which involved tasks like shelling walnuts.

Why the heavy investment?

Galaxy General’s latest financing round is not just a company achievement but also a signal that the entire embodied intelligence sector has entered the “national narrative” stage.

First, policy has elevated embodied intelligence to a national strategic level. The 2025 government work report explicitly mentions “cultivating future industries such as embodied intelligence,” with cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou launching special action plans.

Second, industrial capital is replacing financial capital as the dominant force. Looking at Galaxy General’s investor map, from early-stage VC firms to industry giants like CATL, SAIC, BAIC, and now state-backed funds, the changes are clear. Sinopec’s involvement suggests its thousands of convenience stores could become deployment scenarios for Galaxy General; CITIC Group’s participation opens up possibilities in high-end manufacturing bases and commercial real estate.

According to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, by December 2025, total financing in China’s embodied intelligence and robotics sector reached 73.5 billion yuan. However, industry reshuffling is accelerating amid the boom. Third-party statistics show that over the past year, more than 20 global robotics companies faced bankruptcy or business divestment.

From industry trends, capital, resources, and talent are increasingly concentrated in leading enterprises. Currently, there are seven domestic embodied intelligence companies valued at over 10 billion yuan, including Yushutec, Zhiyuan Robotics, Galaxy General, Xinghaitu, and others, marking a new phase of development into a cluster of top unicorns.

Two “Post-85” Tech Entrepreneurs

The story of Galaxy General begins with two founders with very different yet highly complementary backgrounds.

Chief Technology Officer Wang He is a typical academic entrepreneur. Born in 1992, he graduated from Tsinghua University’s Department of Electronics, then pursued a PhD at Stanford University under the mentorship of American Academy of Engineering member Leonidas J. Guibas. He is one of the earliest scholars worldwide to research end-to-end embodied large models.

During his time at Stanford, Wang experienced the early stages of AI evolution from virtual to physical intelligence. In 2021, he returned to China to join Peking University’s Frontier Computing Research Center, founding EPIC Lab (Embodied Perception and Interaction Lab), and established the Embodied Intelligence Research Center at Beijing’s Institute of Artificial Intelligence.

Yao Tengzhou, Wang’s partner, represents another extreme. A graduate of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Robotics Institute, he studied under robotics pioneer Wang Tianmiao, and previously worked at ABB’s Shanghai Robotics R&D Center, with deep hardware engineering and mass production experience.

From their backgrounds, Wang has top-tier academic credentials, while Yao has strong engineering capabilities. This “top academic + hardcore industrial” combination is rare in today’s embodied intelligence startup wave.

In May 2023, Galaxy General was officially founded and headquartered in Haidian, Beijing. From the outset, the company adopted a “brain-first, body-pragmatic” technical approach.

At that time, the mainstream narrative in humanoid robotics was bipedal walking. Many competitors launched robots capable of running, jumping, and backflips to demonstrate control technology. However, Wang’s team believed that walking was not the core obstacle for commercial deployment; the real bottleneck was the robot’s “brain”—generalized grasping, autonomous decision-making, and physical interaction capabilities.

“We’re not pursuing walking tricks like humans, but focusing on injecting a super AI brain that understands the world and operates flexibly,” Wang explained later in an interview.

This judgment led Galaxy General to adopt a wheeled chassis combined with foldable legs—ensuring mobility stability while focusing R&D resources on the coordination of “hands, eyes, and brain.”

This year, the robot was featured on the Spring Festival Gala, labeled as a “work robot.” Clearly, this points directly to its commercial direction.

From 700 million to 20 billion valuation leap

If the technical route determines how far Galaxy General can go, then the pace of financing determines how fast it can run.

Reviewing Galaxy General’s funding history, it’s almost a “lightning-fast” story of rounds every six months, each raising hundreds of millions, with successive oversubscriptions.

Just one month after its founding, in June 2023, Galaxy General completed seed funding, with investors including Matrix Partners China and Blue Lake Capital.

In June 2024, one year after its founding, the company closed an angel round of 700 million yuan, setting a record for that year’s angel funding. Investors included Meituan, BAIC, and other strategic and industrial backers, along with Qiming Venture Partners and IDG Capital.

In November 2024, it completed a strategic round of 500 million yuan, with SAIC Group, HKIC (Hong Kong Investment Company), and Shenzhen Venture Capital participating.

The pivotal year was 2025, when CATL entered.

In June 2025, Galaxy General announced over 1.1 billion yuan in Series B funding, led by CATL, with co-investors including China Development Bank’s Sci-Tech Innovation Fund, Beijing Robotics Industry Fund, and GSR Ventures. This was CATL’s first major investment in a embodied intelligence company and the only robotics firm it invested in.

What convinced CATL was Galaxy General’s real-world industrial deployment—its industrial heavy-duty robot Galbot S1 had achieved full autonomous operation in complex scenarios at CATL’s battery factories and was integrated into regular production.

By December 2025, Galaxy General set a new record with over $300 million (about 2.1 billion yuan) in Series C funding, with post-investment valuation surpassing 20 billion yuan. The round was led by China Mobile Chain Long Fund, with China International Capital Corporation, CCTV Media Fund, and Suzhou Venture Capital joining, along with international investors from Singapore and the Middle East.

Just on March 2, 2026, the largest embodied intelligence financing of the year was finalized: 2.5 billion yuan, with the third phase of the National Big Fund making its first move into the sector.

“Real Work Robots”?

The 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala became Galaxy General’s breakthrough moment from industry insider to the general public.

In the New Year microfilm “My Most Unforgettable Night,” Galaxy General’s robot “Galbot” appeared on stage with Shen Teng and Ma Li, performing five detailed tasks: shelling walnuts, picking up glass shards, fetching items from shelves, folding clothes, and skewering sausages.

Unlike previous years’ performances that only involved scripted routines, Galbot operated fully autonomously—perceiving, deciding, and executing in real-time—all driven by their self-developed “Galaxy Brain,” not pre-set scripts.

Behind this is Galaxy General’s core technological barrier—the world’s first integrated “brain-cerebellum-neural control” end-to-end embodied large model.

Most of the industry currently separates development of the brain (task planning), cerebellum (motion control), and dexterous hands (fine manipulation), with inconsistent standards and information degradation across modules, leading to response delays and weak generalization.

Galaxy General’s AstraBrain unifies the entire chain from multimodal perception to motor control, achieving deep integration of full-body coordination and fine hand operations.

If technology is the moat of Galaxy General, then commercialization is its key credential for backing by the national team.

Currently, the company has established a commercial matrix of industrial manufacturing, new retail, and healthcare.

In industrial manufacturing, Galaxy General is the only humanoid robot company that has achieved regular operations at CATL. Its heavy-duty industrial robot Galbot S1, with dual arms capable of lifting up to 50 kg, meets industrial standards and can operate stably in dusty, vibrating, and temperature-variable environments.

In the Spring Festival Gala segment “Shanhai Dream,” Galbot S1 appeared alongside major national equipment like satellites and C919 aircraft. Besides CATL, Galaxy General has partnered with Bosch, Toyota, BAIC, SAIC, and other global manufacturing giants, with orders reaching thousands of units. In December 2025, the company signed a strategic agreement with Paita Precision to deploy over 1,000 robots within its ecosystem.

In the new retail and consumer sectors, Galaxy General has pioneered the “Galaxy Space Cabin” model.

This autonomous retail unit operated by Galbot can handle greeting, ordering, payment, and pickup processes. The Galaxy Space Cabin has been deployed in over 20 cities, including Beijing’s Summer Palace, Yuanmingyuan, Wangfujing, the Bird’s Nest, and in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Chengdu, and Xiamen, with more than 100 units.

In instant retail and smart pharmacy, Galaxy General set an industry record with over a year of continuous 24/7 operation of its instant retail warehouses. It has established smart retail pharmacies in 24 cities, managing over 5,000 SKUs per store.

In healthcare, Galaxy General collaborates deeply with top-tier hospitals like Xuanwu Hospital and West China Hospital, deploying robots in wards, pharmacies, and guiding patients. Reports indicate testing of robots for blood pressure measurement and cognitive assessments for the elderly, gradually transitioning to nighttime ward rounds.

“We don’t aim for robots to do 100 tasks, but to do 10 tasks at industrial-grade standards,” Wang He once defined the company’s deployment strategy.

With the new 2.5 billion yuan financing, what’s next for Galaxy General?

The company states that after this round, it will continue focusing on building a globally leading embodied large model, using it as the core to advance more benchmark projects, and accelerate the scale-up of embodied intelligence.

Wang He previously envisioned that developing general-purpose robots is a long-term process—first accumulating data to enable scenario closed-loop deployment of models; then hardware iteration and upgrades; ultimately creating industry-specific products.

Technically, Galaxy General still faces two major challenges: one is further breakthroughs in dexterous hands—while their current hands are industry-leading, costs and reliability need optimization; the other is whether and when to develop bipedal forms—current wheeled solutions are pragmatic but limited on stairs and complex terrains.

Regardless, Galaxy General is advancing rapidly in domestic embodied intelligence industry with a focus on physical intelligence and industrialization.